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[§ By A. D. MAYO, A.M., LL.D. 


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ig Am J.ddress Delivered to the Faculty and Studenti 
C§ of Berea College, Ky., on May 1, 1905 

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The Government of the South 
by the Plain People. 

An Address delivered to the Faculty and Students of 
Berea College, Ky., on May i, ipoj. 



By a. D. :\Iav(). A.m., LL.D. 



i\braham Lincoln used to say, "God seems to 
have a liking for the plain people." By the plain 

people Abraham Lincoln meant his own 
People. soi't of people. The first we hear of his 

forefathers and foremothers was at the 
respectable county seat of Bristol County, Mass., 
from which my great grandmother hailed, and 
which she always spoke of (I don't know why) 
as "Taunton, good Lord." The first resting place 
of the family on its journey "out west" w^as 
Pennsylvania, where a descendant figures in the 
local records as "Mordecai -Lincoln, Gentleman." 
Then the family branched off, a portion of them 
becoming Quakers, the majority going on to Yiv- 
ginia, and one that we hear of fighting under 
\\'ashington in the War of the Revolution. The 
branch that "struck" Kentucky had for its nom- 
inal head perhaps the only "degenerate" member 
of the tribe; one of those men "sized up" to me 
by a bright and handsome colored chambermaid 
in Texas as "one of thein comical creatures that 
we women marry and have to support." Happily, 
little Abraham was the son of one and the cher- 
ished little boy of another of that sort of w^omen 
that go through life weighted with a "comical" 

I 



or worse man and still bring up their children 

to become "the salt of the earth." 

Like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln 

never troubled himself about his ancestors. But 

what he meant by the plain 
Non-SIaveholding , . ^ ,,^ , ^ , 

Southerners. people that Lrod seems to nave 

a liking for," as far as related to 
the South, was the five or six millions of white 
folk that in i860 in these fifteen States had never 
in any way been concerned with the ownership 
of negro slaves. From the beginning these South- 
erners who w^ere not slaveholders had formed by 
far the larger proportion of the white population. 
They fought the battles of the South — first in 
clearing the land of the "noble savage" ; then sup- 
plying the bulk of its loyal populations in the 
Revolution ; driving the crack regiments of Wel- 
lington and Waterloo into the sea at New 
Orleans, under "plain" Andrew Jackson; after- 
wards wresting the empire of Texas from Mexico 
and expanding the Republic towards the South- 
w^est to the Pacific Ocean ; and, finally, under 
General Robert E. Lee, through four terrible 
years, following their leaders from Charlestown to 
Appomattox with a devotion and courage so mag- 
nificent that nothing but the deplorable cause for 
which they fought could have caused their defeat. 

But indeed what we call, by a figure of Eng- 
lish speech, the ''Southern Aristocracy" was not 

wholly aristocratic. The 350,000 

"Southern ' ^ . ,, . . ,. 

Aristocracy." owners of slaves, the majority of 

wdiom were probably owned by 

50,000 men, with their families and the profes- 

2 



sional classes amounting to some two millions oi 
people, who for the first seventy - five years of 
the Republic possessed the earth, owned the four 
millions of colored laborers, monopolized thie 
society, the wealth and the culture, and fashioned 
the religion of these eleven States to their own 
liking ; and through this concentration of interest 
practically governed the nation till i860 — even 
this pow^erful and splendid aristocracy was itself 
the product of the plain people of the original 
European immigation and descent of the previous 
two hundred and fifty years. For the amiable 
hallucination with which the leading class of the 
South for these three centuries has beguiled itself, 
that it was the hereditary first cousin of the 
British arist'ocrac};, is now, thanks to the his- 
torians, "on its last legs." The less said about 
the bad boys of distinguished families that fiirst 
came to Mrginia and, but for Captain John Smith, 
would have disappeared in a "dissolving view" 
of shiftlessness and insubordination, the better 
for all concerned. 

At the breaking out of the Revolution the 
people of \'irginia were in no superior sense the 

descendants of the "Cavaliers"; al- 
Not all , , . , , . , 

Cavaliers, though a portion of their best men came 

of fathers who fought under the Stuarts. 

For more than a century the British convict ships 

unloaded their freight upon the Atlantic southern 

colonies. These so - called convicts were not all 

criminals as we count criminals, to-day, but 

neither were they aristocrats. To a considerable 

extent they were people imprisoned for debt, non- 

3 



conformity to church law, or some very minor 

misdemeanors. During and after the Revolution 

that sent Charles I. to the block and made Oliver 

Cromwell Protector, the immigration to the 

South was a fair mixture of the followers of both 

the great English contending parties. For their 

original interest in education and the backbone 

of their religion, the Southern Atlantic colonies 

were indebted largely to the Scotch-Irish and the 

Germans ; the latter declared by Washington 

"their best class of immigrants" — neither of them 

of the vaunted "Anglo-Saxon" stock. 

The plain truth is that the Aristocracy of the 

South, previous to i£6o, was founded on the 

. . . plantation svstem of agriculture and 

Aristocracy ^ - ^ 

Founded on ill every essential feature was a New 

Ability and World 'copv of the British "gentry." 
Service. _ , ^ ^ t^ j 

It originated and was perpetuated for 

two centuries until iS6o in the same way as its 
British predecessor. Somebody has said : "Sixty 
thousand thieves came over with AA'illiam the 
Conquerer and founded the British Aristocracy." 
Of course, the descendants of the Norsemen 
pirates, at that date, would hardly dispute this 
"title of nobility." But the original British 
nobility came up precisely as the leading class in 
Boston, New York and Chicago to-day — by pro- 
motion for ability of the kind then most in de- 
mand. Almost annihilated by the Wars of the 
Roses and the Protestant Reformation, the 
"Xoble Lords" were renewed in the same way: 
by the promotion of men wdio in some way had 
rendered service to the state. To-day the British 

4 



nobility is what it is because it lives with its 
front door wide open, with the possibility that 
any ambitious and able boy can be added to its 
ranks for service m any profession, from every 
class and calling. 

The aristocracy that governed the South and 
politically governed the nation till i860, w^as built 
on no such foundation of "hay, straw and stubble" 
as an hereditary descent from its cousins in 
^Motherland. Indeed, the North in i860, were it 
interested in heredity, could trace as "noble" a 
heritage. Three hundred years ago Virginia 
included the present United States from the 
Atlantic coast as far westward as any white men 
had "set up his Ebenezer." There was "land to 
burn" at the disposal of the Crown. Every man 
wdio landed on the Southern Atlantic coast and 
was enterprising enough to make his owu w^ay 
could become the possessor of an estate that 
would rouse the envy of a British country gen- 
tleman. The possession of slaves and, first, the 
raising of tobacco, afterwards the monopolv of 
cotton and semi-tropical productions, enabled a 
small percentage of this people with true British 
energy to forge to the front. The real distinction 
of the pjritish aristocracy is that, from the first, 
it has had a liberal wing to furnish leadership for 
the masses on the way to the present control of 
the House of Commons by the powerful Middle 
Class. Through the toils and conflicts of one 
hundred and seventy-five years this foremost class 
of the South by 1776 had b.een educated up to the 
British idea of liberal government and the de- 



mand for the whole American white people of 
British civic and personal rights. 

It may well be said that at this period our 
colonial was indeed the consummate flower of 
the British aristocracy. William E. Gladstone 
said : "When I was a boy, I read the life of George 
Washington and believed him the greatest man 
that ever lived, and I have never changed my 
opinion." It was indeed significant that, from 
this upper American class. North and South, a 
centur}^ ago, there came to the front a group of 
men who, according to the same authority, was 
pronounced the most eminent of its age in the 
fashioning of a republican order of society and 
government destined to become the common lot 
of mankind. 

Had it not been weighted to its final death 

with the barbarism of negro slavery, this splendid 

order of republican nobility, with 

^'^^^7 *^^ ^^"^ the states it represented, might 
of Southern ^ _ ' & 

Aristocracy. have been indefinitely prolonged. 

And for this burden it is hardly 
responsible. Three hundred years ago every 
Christian nation was slave-]:olding, and the 
masses of the continental European people in all 
essential rights and opportunities were half a 
century behind our ten millions of colored Ameri- 
can citizens to-day. But no man or no class can 
hold any other man or class in chattel slavery 
without turning the back on every kind of man 
not of its own sort. So from year to year the 
slave-holding and dominant class, though de- 
pendent on the Southern plain white people for 

6 



the soldiery that cleared the land of the savage 
and fought its battles and cast its votes, left it 
practically out of account in the recognition of its 
fundamental right to education, and relied on 
the few that struggled up from the ranks to 
eminence to recruit its own ranks. 

But with all this drawback, this Aristocracy, 
always in any emergency acting together, under 
Jefferson "expanded" the republic to the summit 
of the Rocky Mountains, and under Polk, Scott 
and Fremont carried the flag to the Southwestern 
Pacific shore. In i860 there was probably no 
body of nobility in Europe so powerful, able to 
plunge a Christian nation into a civil war for its 
own existence, as the class that under Jefferson 
Davis for four years fought the Union, until 
amid the thunder of cannon in Old Virijinia, in 
hearing distance of the sea beach smitten by the 
"fatal and perfidious bark" that landed the first 
cargo O'f negro slaves, it went to its death at 
Appomattox. Any great Aristocracy, like the 
present British, that always keeps in touch with 
and at every critical period yields to the just 
demand of the plain people, may be indefinitely 
continued, to the honor and glory of a Christian 
civilization. The fatal mistake of the Southern 
Aristocracy was that, under the assertion of the 
right of self-government for eleven States, in the 
full blaze of the nineteenth century, it struck for 
a new nationality, which, if achieved, would not 
only have established the last slave empire in 
Christendom, but would have left the plain white 

7 



people with few or no rights their poHtical mas- 
ters "were bound to respect." 

But, as abroad, there was a "liberal wing" of 
this Southern Aristocracy. Thomas Jefiferson 
always held his political theory of 
Liberal Element ,^|emocra,cy conditioned on his 
of Southern ■' . - • i t- i 

Aristocracy. other theory of Universal Educa- 

tion, which included the emanci- 
pation and education of the negroes and the 
training of every white child in a system reaching 
from the free common school to the State Uni- 
versitv. In his sorrow and wrath that his own 
State w^ould not adopt his splendid ideal, he 
declared that "his own people would become 
worse than the inhabitants of the Barbary States." 
All the great Virginians were with hirfi, and he 
left a growing common school public that in 
every Southern State for forty years attempted 
to put his educational system on the ground. And 
for the Southern Aristocracy, as a whole, it may 
be said, ''nothing so became it as its leaving." 
During the twenty years after 1864, when the 
sons of the fathers were still permitted to govern 
the South, it adopted the American common 
Schooi for l)oth races and all classes, essentially 
iS set up in every Southern State, by the power 
Z)f the nation during the period of reconstruction. 
Having done this, its grandest work since the 
days of Washington, it ''retired in good order," 
and no longer exists, as a class, in any Southern 
State. 

But now what were the plain people of the 
South about during the first seventy years of the 

8 



Republic, up to the fatal year when, at the call 
of the aristocracy, they "shouldered arms" and 
through four years made fcr the American sol- 
diery a name and fame undisputed through the 
world? 

First, a body, now probably represented in 
the Northw^est by as many people as the entire 
2,000,000 of the old dominant Southern class, dis- 
couraged by the prospect at heme, turned their 
backs upon the land of their birth and flocked 
to the new Northwest. Along with them w^ere a 
considerable number of the more liberal-minded 
of the leading families, in pursuit of a broader 
opportunity than they left behind. During the 
twenty years from 1830 to 1850, nearly the entire 
body of pronounced anti-slavery people in the 
South, including the Quakers, removed \\'est. 
Among them were the parents of Abraham Lin- 
coln, and with him a large body of young men 
whose names became household words, twenty 
3'ears later, m loyal service to the Union. No 
Slate contributed more valuable people of this 
sort to the three great Northern commonwealths 
across the Ohio River than Kentucky. 

Those that stayed at home, under the leader- 
ship of the '^liberal wing," the all - round follow- 
ers of Jefferson, for thirty years, from 1830 to 
i860, agitated every Southern State with their 
demand for common school education for the 
wdiite people. They w^ere opposed largely by the 
planter class and the Protestant clergy, who at 
that time had greater influence in Southern edu- 
cation than the Catholic clergy in Italy to-day. 

9 



Almost every Southern public man of national 
reputation understcod and favored the educa- 
tional movement, with some of the foremost lead 
ers in the universities. But by i860 only two 
border States, Missouri and Kentucky, with 
North Carolina and Louisiana and several of the 
largest cities, had succeeded in keeping on the 
ground a system of commcn schools for white 
youth ; for wdiich they were indebted to the labors 
of a group of educators that the children in these 
States in the future will crcwn with honor. The 
history cf this remarkable movement has been 
g:iven to the country by the Ignited States Bureau 
of Education, and should be read by every school 
teacher in these sixteen States. The result was 
that, at the outbreak of the Civil A\^ar, there was 
a common school public in the South, the educa- 
tional disciples of Jefiferson, who were ready to 
take advantage of the opportunity that came, ten 
years later, to plant the American common school 
in every Southern State. 

The four years of war were a great university 
for the plain white people of the South. First, it 
gathered up a million of their young 
The Civil War and able-bodied men and sent them 
Brought the ..^^^ ^|^^.-^ travels" through their 
Plain People ^ 

to the Fore. own vast empire, from Washington 

to Alexico. Twenty years ago a 
Southern Governor told me that not one man in 
live hundred in his State traveled one hundred 
miles a year. The stay-at-home Southerner of 
those States, outside of the upper sort and the Im- 
migrating class, lived within his own beat, aw^ay 

10 



from contact with his betters, tied to his own 
possessions and hampered by ilHteracy in a way 
nobody has yet pubhshed t'o the world. He had 
a vigorous training by his own obstinate sense 
of independence ; as a soldier in the almost con- 
stant wars of the past century; in politics and 
religion chiefly by the public speaking and preach- 
ing of the famous body of Southern orators, of 
whom now and then one still dazzles the country 
by his magnificent, meteoric showier of splendid 
rhetoric. But the majority of them knew next 
to nothing of the resources of their own State 
and section, and the North in i860 was farther 
away than ''Farther India" and "Darkest Africa" 
to every bright Southern school boy to-day. In 
their tremendous campaigns that, in four years, 
"wore out" a generation more completely than 
the w^ars of Napoleon, which reduced the stature 
of French manhood two inches, this million, in- 
cluding nearly all the young men, for the first 
time were introduced to their own country ; and 
that was a great education. They also learned 
that in war it is the brains behind the ba>onets 
and the kind of ''man behind the gun" that wins 
battles by land and sea. And it finally dawned 
upon them that the one thing in this world that 
can not be upset is the upper side of modern 
Christian civilization — a civilization then repre- 
sented by the three million American men in arms 
for the preservation of a Union founded on a 
pledge of "the lives, the fortunes and the sacred 
honor" of their own great grandfathers and grand- 
mothers. 

II 



There was also not a little schcolino- in letters 



t> 



going on in the Southern army. I heard of an 
entire regiment that during a winter encampment 
in Sciith Carolina learned to read. I met, as the 
acting President of a Southern State university, 
a man who, in a great prison camp on Chesapeake 
Bay, through an entire season with a large num- 
ber of the prisoners, went to school, and w^as 
there ''fitted for college." In 1866 the whole 
South woke up to the idea that, unless something 
was done at once, a great multitude of its children, 
from five to ten, would be compelled to join the 
army of illiterates. 

Also a new contingent, five millions of freed- 
men, was now added to the plain people of the 
South ; declared and for ten years by the most 
hazardous experience in histor^y raised to the 
position of "sovereign citizenship" and practically, 
under leaders not always from the North, wielding 
the government of eleven great American common- 
wealths. 

Then the North and the Nation came to the 

rescue and durincr the ten years of so-called re- 

construction established in every 

Reconstruction State, for the first time, the Amer- 

Gave the -^^^^ common school for the whole 

Common School 

to the South. people ; realizing after eighty years 

the dream of Thomas Jefiferson. 
Of course, the system was crude, absurdly elab- 
orate and expensive for the then poverty-stricken 
and demoralized South ; in seme States attempt- 
ing the impossibility of schooling the races to- 
gether. But, with all these drawbacks, including 

12 



the splendid work done among the negroes and 
poorer whites under the protection of the army 
during the war, it probably by 1876 had tauglit 
two millions of children to read, had set many 
thousand Scuthern young men and women to 
teaching schocl, and had created in the upper 
strata of both races a demand for universal edu- 
cation that no body of public men dared to refuse. 
W hatever may have been the mistakes and the 
injury to the South during this reconstruction 
period, that fundamental v\'ork of establishing for 
the first time the American common school, for a 
century before declared by every great Southern 
statesman absolutely necessary to republican m- 
stitutions, entitles the North, the negro citizen 
who always voted for education, and the nation to 
the everlasting gratitude of t'he whole Southern 
people. 

Then it was first realized that the greatest 
gain to every Southern State by the war was the 
emancipation of the plain white Southern people 
from- their oM position of the past seventy-five 
3cars. First came the opportunity, hitherto o.nly 
gained by leaving the South and taking up new 
lands in the A\'est, to obtain new homes in the 
best lands of their own States. Thousands of the 
great plantations were divided and the farmers, 
hitherto confined to' the less fertile uplands and 
tlie mountain country, swarmed down and "made 
themselves at home." The number of farms in 
fourteen States had increased 1,000,000 from 1880 
to 1900. During the past forty yer.rs prob- 
ably more than a million young n:en froni 

13 



the leading- families of the South, with thousands 
of young women, have moved on to the North- 
west, the Pacific coast, and the greater cities of 
the Northeast. There is no longer any class in 
any such position of influence in any Southern 
State as the slave-holding aristocracy of fifty 
vears ago. This, itself, has been a movement of 
incalculable importance to the j^lain white people, 
vastly increasing and diversifying the products 
of the land; opening the mines; felling the for- 
ests, and introducing them to every grade of man- 
ufacturing industry. 

But even more important has been the estab- 
lishment of the entire American system of com- 
mon school education that, in forty years, has 
loosened the Southern home purse to the extent 
of several hundred millions of dollars ; including 
to-day 3,000,000 white children and youth ; in 
every considerable city offering free education to 
every child ; having brought from the North prob- 
ably more than a hundred millions of dollars invested 
in schools ; with a group of Southern benefactors 
establishing and endowing new universities, and 
by home effort vastly enlarging the opportunities 
for the academical and collegiate education of 
every class of the wdiite people. 

Of course, the greatest result of this move- 
ment has l^een with the plain people of the South, 
who, for the first time in three hun- 

The Liberal ^ ^ years, have been invited to share 
Aristocrats. ^ ' 

in the accumulated wisdom and 

knowledge of Christendom. And here again has 
been demonstrated the fact that every Anglo- 

14 



Saxon, and especially every American superior 
class, is at heart patriotic, and, in the last emer- 
gency, ready to respond to the words of the Mas- 
ter: "Let him who is greatest among you be your 
servant." Since the year 1870, for now thirty- 
five years, despite the usual Bourbon contingent 
that "we have always with us," the superior class 
* of the South has given itself to the schooling of 
the plain people of -both races, with an intelli- 
gence and zeal and at a sacrifice of money unsur- 
passed in the history of education. 

I speak now of what I know. For twenty 
years I lived in the South in a "Ministry of Edu- 
cation" that included the whole people, from low- 
est to hi.ghest. For ten years past, in writing for 
the National Government the "history of the 
American common school," I have learned how, 
for two hundred and fifty years, the people of !h.^ 
North have been at work and through what toih% 
conflicts, sacrifices and countless experiments 
they have at last given to the republic its most 
precious possession — the present system of cam- 
mon, private and incorporated schools of every 
grade. And I say again, in view of all this, that 
whatever discount must be made for inevitable 
failure, indifference and hostility, no mo-re valu- 
able, patriotic and thoroughly American work 
has been done during these thirty years than by 
the superior people of the South in the planting 
of the common school and the revival of the 
higher education fo^r botb races and a.ll classes. 
No group of men better deserves enrollm.ent with 
the "fathers of their country" than George Pea- 

15 



1)odv, an adopted citizen of the South, with Johns 
Hopkins, Paul Tulane, Mrs. Newcomb and others, 
and with them the leaders of education : William 
Preston Johnston, Atticu? Haygood, liugh S. 
Thompson and Dr. J. "L. AI. Curr3\ who already 
have gone on to the beyond ; and another multitude, 
just "resting from their labors," men and "noble 
women not a few" — Laura Haygood, Clara Con- 
way and AJary Stamps among the noblest of the. 
noble. 

''Part of the host have crossed the flooxl 
And part are crossing now." 

In this era of progress fifty per cent of the 

ten millions of negro citizens have learned to read 

the Bible and write their ballot — as soon 
Progress . ^ . , . , . . 

thus far. ^^ the rest ot the plam peopre ot the 

South will let them cast it. A great in- 
road has been 'made upon the fearful white illiter- 
acy of fifty years ago. Alultitudes of ambitious 
boys and girls, vvhose fathers and mothers "died 
without the sight," ha.ve welcomed the rising sun 
that now" darts i.ts searchlight into the darkest 
corners 'of the land. The latest Government -re- 
port from the pre-sent sixteen States we u"sed to 
call the South, excepting },[issouri. gives the fol- 
lowing record -cf public school affairs : Number 
of children and youth in school, 5,894,731. Aver- 
age number of years in school for each pupil, 3J2. 
Average number of school days in. each year, 
100^. Total amount .expended in 1903 for edu- 
cation, $31,000,000.00. (In the same year the State 
of New York expended $37,000,000.00.) It may be 
fairly stated that during manv years since the 

16 



war these States have expended as largely from 
their own property valuation in proportion as the 
North, with a far greater strain upon the educa- 
tional public to maintain what has been gained 
each year and to make reliable progress. 

And never was the North so ready, with no 
disposition to interfere in local school adminis- 
tration and no assumption of patronage, to pour 
out its wealth for the uplift of the plain people 
of the South of both races ; to say nothing of its 
enormous financial investments in the material 
and industrial progress of this section, as to-day. 

The final demonstration of the old-time South- 
ern aristocracy that began with the establishment 
and perished in the attempt to 

Movement for destroy the republic; not as an 
National Aid for / . , . , , 

Southern organization, but through the last 

Education. group of eminent statesmen the 

South has sent to Congress ; was 
Its splendid advocacy of the ''Blair bill" for 
National Aid to Education ; three tim.es passed 
at the entreaty in the South of eighteen of the 
twenty-two Senators from the ex-Confederate 
States. The history of that eventful ten years has 
never yet been written. The North, and even 
New^ England, for good reasons, does not yet 
want it written. Had that great act of states- 
manship become a law, with only an enforcement 
of average honesty, it would have furnisl:ed, not 
only to the present fifteen millions of the 
white, but to ten millions of the plainest plain col- 
ored Southern people to-day a common school as 
good a-s the A\>st had enjoyed up to iS6o. Thanks 

17 



to several sorts of people, each of whom in turn 
will be brought to the bar of the final history that 
is written "by the inspiration cf God," receive its 
sentence and pass on, this great bill was defeated. 
But no such demonstration of patriotic states- 
manship and political foresight has come from 
the South since i860, as this memorable Sena- 
torial discussion, conducted under the approval 
of almost every superior educator of that section. 
History will put this on record, and it will be 
seen again that, finally, any Anglo-Saxon aris- 
tocracy, at heme or abroad, can be trusted at the 
last emergency, at least through its own liberal 
wing, to stand up for the fundamental rights and 
the true glory of the whole people. 

The failure of that final effort in the decade 

between 1880 and 1890 brought a great loss of 

heart and hope to the whole upper 

The Plain story of Southern civilization. But 

People Begin . ^. ^1 • r 

To Govern. the time was then ripe lor a new 

appearance on the stage of public 
affairs of the plain people, who for twenty years 
had been gradually moving to the front. It had 
already develcpe'^'. the class, most dangerous in 
public affairs — the first crop of political leaders 
raised up from a people inexperienced in the use 
of political power, and long subservient to a 
powerful and concentrated dominant class. It 
was fit that South Carolina, the revolutionary 
State of the South, and the State where the plain 
people had been from the beginning most thor- 
oughly under the ban, should lead in this out- 
break under the leadership of that most remark- 

18 



able combination of the shrewd, far-seeing poli- 
tician and champion political freak of American 
politics — the Honorable Benjamin Tillman. He 
saw that the hour had struck to summon the plain 
white people of the South to the government of 
at least the eleven ex-Confederate States. For 
the past fifteen years he has been the ablest and 
most conspicuous leader of the movement that 
has brought every State that bolted the Union in 
1861 under the absolute political control of the 
plain people. And he will be remembered chiefly 
from his praiseworthy educational labors for his 
own State, although otherwise forgotten. Nearly 
every important post of public influence in 
every one of these States is now held by the type 
of politician that always appears as the first 
representative of such a movement. Within these 
lifteen years, with the one break of North Caro- 
lina, these eleven ex-Confederate States have 
been governed by this type of leaders who have 
thus become the political successors of the great 
statesmen identified with the founding, the ex- 
pansion, and, largely, with the glory of the na- 
tion. The plain white people, of the South are 
now, for the hrst time, in power, but in the hands 
of untrained and ambitious leaders, who are often 
acting with questionable wisdom as to the perma- 
nent interests of their own section and the nation. 

Meanwhile, in the face of the opposition of 

this political combination, the Republic has made 

the final new departure that every 

The Nation Christian nation must make ; as in- 

Adopts Its . . 

Colonial Policy, evitably as a rismg young man 

19 



must surround himself with a family of chil- 
dren to be educated, or remain a fruitless 
bachelor. That new departure is: the taking 
to itself of colonies from the child peoples who 
still comprise a majority of the inhabitants of the 
earth, to "train in the way they should go," and, 
according to the national iderd of a Christian re- 
publican civilization. 

Fo here we are today ; a people of eighty mi'I- 
lions, no longer Anglo-Saxon, but of the new 
cosmopolitan American type, made 
"All sorts and Up from every European national- 
Condiaonsof 5^^. yj,^.^.^ '^^.^ -^^ greater New 
Men' make up - ... 

our Nation. York more Jewdsh iVmerican citi- 
zens than in Jerusalem ; more 
Irishmen than in Dublin; except two or mG:e 
cities of Central Europe, more of the Germanic 
and northern European sort ; more southern- 
born white people than in New Orleans ; only 2^ 
per cent of what we used to call "Native Ameri- 
can Stock." Wddle Southern politicians pose as 
the purest of the Anglo-Saxon pure — whatever 
that may be — they are already scheming to flood 
this country wdth new millions of the ignorant 
Lathi European folk, to "fight it out," through 
the labor unions with the ten millions of the na- 
tive colored race that have made their States 
what they are. Today, of our ninety millions, 
one-fourth, here and in our colonies, consists of 
the plainest plain ; the child peoples that within 
the past generation, for the first time, by the mili- 
tary power of the republic, have been liberated 
from the bondage of three hundred years. 

20 



The nation's call for the commg century, to 
which, indeed, all cf Europe is waking up, is the 
solution of the problem cf tlie ages : how to edu- 
cate "all sorts and conditions, of nrjn," a'/, tlic 
immortal children of a God whose name is love ; 
into the final achievement of Chris. i:;n slaLcs- 
manship ; the art of "dwelling together in unity," 
every man in his own place ; all "working to- 
gether for good ;" to bring in the kingdom of 
heaven on earth. 

This republic, so far, has not only "followed 
the American flag," but the American flag has 
from the beginning followed the divine Provid- 
ence ; the Creator of all worlds, the Sovereign of 
every human soul. Guided by that Providence, 
the nation is called to deal, on the one hand with 
the American representatives cf "Darkest Af- 
rica," and on the other with the first ten millions 
in Asia invited to sit down at the table and eat 
and drink at the banquet that celebrates the in- 
auguration of a "government of the people, by the 
people, and for the people," round the world. No 
section, no class, no party, no church will be en- 
trusted w^th the w^orking out of this mighty prob- 
lem. It is given alone to the whole American 
people to decide between the Pagan and the 
Christian way of solving this riddle of the ages ; 
the last and most obstinate "sum" to be "ciphered 
out," to "bring the right answer," on peril of 
being remanded to the dust heap of history, 
where lie the remains of every nation of the past 
that "knew not God." 

The Pagan theory of the so-called "race ques- 
21 



tion" is briefly this: Government of the many by 

the few and for the few ; a man 
The Pagan Theory . , . . . 

of Caste. born m the superior class is al- 

ways superior ; a man born in the 
inferior class always inferior. Every superior 
man and woman is a brevet deity, promoted at 
last to the Pagan Pantheon, where is gathered 
together a celestial rabble, best represented in the 
mythologies of Greece and Rome with the "dim 
religious" background of the Gods who were no 
Gods ; the awful fates of the Oriental world. The 
business of the dignitaries in this Pantheon is, in 
the intervals of its own quarrels in the upper 
story above the clouds, to amuse itself with pet- 
ting or tormenting the swarming millions of "hu- 
man trash" in this "vale of tears belcw." And un- 
less that celestial crowd has greatly mended its 
''tricks and manners ;" if following the example of 
royal visitations to our Republican shores, it 
should appear some fine Monday morning in the 
Greater New York, every soul of them would be 
in Sing Sing, each awaiting its turn to mount the 
electric chair before Saturday night. Or if they 
landed in New Orleans, they would all be lynched 
before sundown of the same day, amid the ap- 
plause of the American people. 

Eighteen centuries ago, when the whole civil- 
ized world was gathered up in the fist of a Roman 
Emperor, awaiting his assassina- 
The Christian ^-^^^^^ q^-, earth to become a new 
Idea — a Chance ^ , . , t-, , i • 

for Every God m the Pantheon, a wandering 

Human. Being. prophet, away off in a province 
more obscure than any island in the Oriental 

22 



seas today, in a plain talk with a group of 
plain people about him, laid down the law of 
life which, yet, only half understood and less than 
half applied, has already created what we call 
Christendcm. In two sentences, containing 
thirty-two words, all of which could be engraved 
within the golden circle of the American eagle — 
value ten dollars — Jesus said: ''Let him who is 
greatest among you be your servant. Even as 
the son of man came not to be ministered unto 
but to minister and to give his life a ransom for 
many." Just in^ proportion as every so-called 
Christian people has "squared up" to this su- 
preme law of human life, this absolute constitu- 
tion of human government, it has become a per- 
manent nationality ; and today only as any nation 
is working on that line is it a vital power in the 
progress of mankind. 

Xow, the plain people of the South ; for the 

first time in political power, and fast becoming 

supreme in Southern society, is 

J.l'u r'.^'"^^^°'^J!~T. taking its first lessons in the art 
What Leaders Shall ^ 

They Follow? of republican government, ac- 

cording to the ideals of the 
fathers. These ideals, a hundred years ago, were 
the highest conception then reached of the meth- 
od of solving all race questions, laid down by the 
greatest teacher and statesmen, because the Sav- 
ior of mankind. I am not here to tell you what 
success or failure has attended this beginning, 
under the sort of Southern leadership that ap- 
pears, en the first Monday of every December, in 
the Capitol at Washington. Only, let us not 

23 



imagine for a moment that the acts of half a 
dozen Legislatures, and the vaticinations of the 
gospel of sociology of which Orator John Temple 
Graves is the prophet, are to be the permanent de- 
cisions of the fifteen millions of our white South- 
ern folk. For every white man in the South 
today has become in an eminent sense one of the 
plain people ; and in the outcome we shall see 
there, as everywhere, the survival of the fittest. 

Nobody cares what company a gentleman in 
Virginia or Texas chooses to keep, if he manages 
to keep outside of the "revised statutes." But 
everv gentleman and lady in this Republic will 
some day find out that there is no permanent class 
or caste in this Nation, made up of every shad- 
ow of a shade of color and every variety of race 
and "previous condition" on the face of the earth. 
So our friends can be excused from lying awake 
o' nights, scheming to preserve the "purity of the 
Anglo-Saxon race," by remanding twenty mil- 
lions now under the American flag to the condi- 
tion of the old European serfdom that Russia is lying 
awake oAiights with hideous dreams, just now, 
agonizing how to change to a new^ Russian citi- 
zenship. If these admirable people will read their 
New Testament through the spectacles of the 
"common Christianity," and realize that they 
have todav the grandest opportunity on earth in 
the education and training of their ten millions 
of colored citizens, not to be Anglo-Saxons, but 
to become the best that the Lord of us all had in 
mind at their introduction upon earth, they can 
safely leave the business of evolving the new 

24 



American order of society in His hands. For in 
this Repubhc the "best society" means the so- 
ciety of the best people, of all sorts and condi- 
tions. This uppermost of all "upper classes" lives 
with its doors and windows open, four square to 
all comers. Anybody from anywhere may come 
in and live and be happy, as long as he under- 
stands and tries to live up to the conviction that 
all his superiorities are loaned to him by God for 
the sake of the "general welfare." And he will 
cease to be a member of God's American aris- 
tocracy when he makes up his mind not to live up 
there, but to leave the Father's house and waste 
his substance in any kind of "riotous living." But 
he must not be surprised if he finds up there a 
certain little Hebrew widow who one day, sur- 
rounded by the "smart set" of Jerusalem, modest- 
ly appeared at the public treasury and "cast in all 
her living," two mites : less than anybody would 
now drop into the American contribution .box in 
its endless round from church to church. And a 
certain young man, afterwards crucified as a here- 
tic and a rebel, looking on, remarked, "She hath 
given her all." 

This conceit of the latest Southern sociology 
with several other notions of similar import, all 
tracing their descent from Pagan Rome and fa- 
talistic India, is bound, in the providence of God 
that, like the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar 
of fire by night, goes before the flag, 

"To have its little day — 
But thou, O Lord, art more than they." 

25 



Now, how shall the plain people of the South 
be educated up to the ideals of the true Washing- 
ton, the true Jefferson, the real 

The Plain People iTj-anklin, the upper strata of the 
Must Learn How i i-, i i i • 

To Rule. fathers we all alike hold ui rev- 

erence ? 

The nation, as represented by the North today, 
can do little save what it has practically for the 
past twenty-five years done — leave these eleven 
ex-Confederate States in a political minority, as 
long as they please to isolate themselves from 
the present American ideals and policies of na- 
tional life. Meanwhile we can show them, in 
dealing with the child peoples in our new colo- 
nies, our way of "solving the race question." But 
there is a point beyond which no party or State 
can go in dealing with those twenty millions of our 
new citizens without "coming up to the Captain's 
office to settle." And, thanks to the superior class 
cf the colored people, under the leadership of 
their first statesman wdio has the right to assume 
the name of Washington; in connection with that 
portion of the Southern white people wdio will 
see that in dealing with them "the Republic re- 
ceives no harm," we can safely, for the present, 
leave the masses of the plain people of the South 
to their own home schoolmaster for instruction 
and leadership. In due time they will, doubtiess, 
touch elbows with our Christian oivilization, and 
realize the beautiful ideal of union now set forth 
b}^ our preacher President ; in his travels through 
the Southland to his month's interview with the 
inhabitants of the wilderness ; who probably by 

26 



our grandchildren will be gathered into schools, 
where the lion and the lamb may lie down, out- 
side each other, and be at peace. 

Our magnificent Xorth, in its joy and glad- 
ness over the ending of the Civil War, has never 
vet (juite understood the part so 
The Border State ^^^^^^^ played bv the loyal South 
and Mountain . ' . " . . ,,,, 

Loyalty ui the saving of the Union, what 

with the five loyal border States, 
^Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, ]\Iaryland 
and Delaware; wdth the almost united patriotism 
of the entire Appalachian region and other por- 
tions of the Southwest ; it is not an exaggeration 
to say that to them and the descendants of the im- 
migrating Southern pccplc :r. the Northwest the 
Union must have been indebted for well-nigh 
500,000 of its three million soldiers, first and 
last, under arms. \Mth the stategic importance of 
this great "buffer" between the fighting North 
and the eleven Confederate States, and, above -all, 
the marvelous political strategy of Abraham Lin- 
coln in the \\ hite House ; to say nothing of the 
splendid military and naval leadership of Thomas 
and Farragut and the group they represented ; it 
is not too much to assert that if the Republic was 
not saved by the Southern loyal soldiery, three 
times the number at any time commanded by 
Washington, it was saved from perhaps another 
four years of General Sherman's "Hell," with its 
terrors of further desolation and more enduring 
unreconciliation. 

Since 1865 the struggle for an all-round Amer- 
icanism in these five States, even extending to 

27 



Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee, has been 
prolonged, and is now only in the beginning. 
West \'irginia was the first Sonthern^ State that 
moved in the establishment of the full common 
school, even before the close of the Civil War. 

Of these 500,000 white and colored soldiery, 
none are more deserving of the nation's gratitude 
than the stron^g fighters from the highland region, 
which perhaps sent forth, men and boys, a half 
of this patriotic host. During those awful years, 
living in the city of Cincinnati, then the best 
Northern watch-tower of the Southwest, com- 
pelled b}' an unworkable body to stay at home and 
do mv best for my country, my frequent habit 
was to visit the landings at the river when the 
boats came in from above, crowded with women 
and children, who, all the way from the Queen 
City to the Big Sandy, were cared for by the good 
people along the northern Ohio shore. It was 
then that I said to myself : "This country owes to 
these fathers and mothers, who, like the widow of 
Palestine, have 'given their all' and then 'thrown 
themselves in,' the training that shall make their 
children and their children's children worthy of 
themselves. God helping me, I will enlist in that 
war." And twenty years later I heard the call 
and went forth, and now, for five and twenty 
years, have dene my uttermost to help my coun- 
try pay that debt. 

This home leadership that shall bring the plain 
peop'le of the South into no politician's rhetorical, 
recognizes the full opportunity and obligation 

28 



A Task for the of "working together for good" 

Young Men and -^^ ^j^^ y^^^ ^^ ^1^^ ^^.j^^^^ people, 
Women of 11, , , 1 

the South must largely be assumed by the 

descendants of those courageous 
men and women who under almost 
incredible peril and sacrifice a generation ago stood 
up for the salvation of the republic. In a hundred 
ways that these young people know a hundred tinier 
better than anybody from the North can tell 
them, they must see to it that this pagan policy 
of the exploiting of our latest come 20,000.000 
to preserve the purity of the Anglo-Saxon or any 
other race on earth shall not prevail. This policy, 
now everywhere insinuated in the "upper circles" 
of society, blurted in trade unions of foreign-born 
and only half-naturalized workmen, or boastfully, 
even eloquently, proclaimed in legislative and 
university halls, when looked through, is only tlu^. 
old story of the children of the good Methodist 
minister, who begged their father that they 
"might learn to dance." "Xo, my dear children, 
dancing is sinful." "But, Pa, didn't you and Ma 
dance when you were young?" "Yes, my chil- 
dren, but we have seen the folly of it." "Oh, Pa, 
just let us dance and see the folly of it, too." This 
crowd of our high-stepping new statesmen and 
social philosophers can not, like the aristocracy 
before them, legally hold the colored laboring 
class of the South in chattel slavery. That body 
of men, two hundred and fifty years ago, followed 
the rest of the world in their organization of labor 
in a semi-tropical country. Their historians have 
the right to claim that the two hundred years of 

29 



negro slavery, by the Providence that Is evermore 
''from evil still educing good," was a university, 
teaching their bondman the three fundamentals 
of American civilization, the habit of continuous 
work, and the knowledge of the language and the 
religion of the world's chief republic. But now, 
when the entire white population of the South is 
called upon l^y this class of its pcliticai and social 
leaders to imitate the Russia of half a century ago 
and remand 20,000,000 of Americans to perpetual 
serfdom, with the denial of every right especially 
dear to every man ready to fight for the old flag, 
the country calls upon the sons and daughters of 
the loyal South of '61 to save its friends and 
brethren from "seeing the folly" of dancing to 
that played-out tune. In this grand campaign of 
education the newest new South will have behind 
It, not cnlv the overwhelming masses of the 
North, but, as Abraham Lincoln wrote in his 
proclamation of freedom, "the considerate judg- 
ment of mankind and the gracious favor of Al- 
mighty God." 

Young men and women, students whom I now^ 
address, this Cerea College of ours has stood lor 
fifty years and, despite all hindrance, stands to- 
day the only institution of learning south of tl:e 
Potomac and the Ohio that under one roof repre- 
sents the complete American ideal of the educa- 
tion of all on the basis of our "common Christian- 
ity," through the discipline and methods of the 
new education, accessible to the plain people now 
sitting in the seat of judgment in the South. But, 
more than any college of the ordinary type, Berea 

30 



represents the loyal South that, with the mighty 
North, a generation ago saved the Union, not 
onlv for you and me, but for those who earnestly 
did their bravest and best to tear themselves awajv^ 
from its protectmg arms. Remember, whatever 
goes up or whatever goes down, Berea College of 
Kentucky is here to stay and do its own best in 
helping to educate the twenty millions of the 
nation's little children ; thus consecrating itself to 
paying the nation's debt to the heirs of those who 
fought and died to save the nation before you 
were born. You come here not merely to "get 
an education," but to be reminded that to you 
and the like of you the country looks to lead the 
grand procession of the plain people of the South 
of all races and conditions towards the only 
Union that is proof against wars more terrible 
than the past, for those who will live here after 
you are dead. I urge you to give the best years 
of your manhood and womanhood to your own 
people ; to the little children and the ambitious 
youth who can not come here, but are waiting to 
hear all about the great "good tidings" that God, 
through your faithful teachers and consecrated 
President, is so ready to impart. Meanw'hile, 
don't forget how to shoot straight — as your great- 
grandfathers at King's Mountain, your grand- 
fathers at New Orleans, and your fathers under 
Abraham Lincoln, their commander-in-chief, shot 
at everybod}^ who attempted to destroy this re- 
public. You will need even more rapid-firing 
guns than theirs to clear the land of vermin and 
face every enemy of your country everywhere 

31 



around the world. But don't forget that your call 
just now is "to teach the young idea how to 
shoot." 

Young men and women, who come to Bcrea 
from the North ; don't come here because knowl- 
edge is served up at a cheaper rate than at home 
by a faculty now doing more and better work 
for less money than any body of good teachers I 
know. Strike hands and hearts with these, your 
brothers and sisters, and go back resolved that 
no such barbarism as the ignorance of the Chris- 
tian way or living and working together for the 
common good shall prevail within your beat, so 
help you God. 1 shall not live to see even the 
full dawn of this cuming of the kingdom in our 
beloved land. lUit, as old John Adams wrote to 
old Thomas Jeffcrson/'you and I may rejoice to- 
gether in Heaven over the coming of the glorious 
day when all the children are at school." Then 
the flag that lloals o\er the schoplhcuse roof here 
on earth will mean the same thing for all these 
millions in the twentieth century of our Lord. 



32 



